Emily Silver Interview

Emily Silver is a wonderful lady who I remember for her smile, most of all. It is years between our meetings, but she always greets me like a sister — and I feel as if I’ve known her all my life. Maybe it’s that we both have our roots in the desert; maybe it’s that we’re passionately domestic, and mothers.

Jeanmarie Simpson: Your work is so clearly inspired by the desert, as you mention in the bio on your website. Why is that, do you think?

Emily Silver: I grew up in Colorado, but my mother grew up in Tucson. She talked wistfully and fondly of playing among the creosote bushes with her brother as a child. One of the earliest photos of me was taken next to a giant saguaro cactus, trying to duplicate a similar one taken of my mom when she was one or two. When I was eight, I spent a couple weeks with my grandmother in Tucson and went to a school which was, at the time, out of town in the desert. In addition, most of the road trips my family took when I was a child were through the deserts of the Southwest: Santa Fe, Mesa Verde, Tucson, Flagstaff, and the Grand Canyon. Because my parents were both geologists, they preferred being able to see the landforms; they didn’t like vegetated areas especially and were constantly stopping and taking slides, collecting fossils, or doing geological detective work. Their immersion in geology used to get on my nerves, as I never thought of myself as a scientist and didn’t think I was interested in it. However, the affect remained and I find I feel most at home in the desert climate, with the wide expanse around me and the shape of the land and its geological and erosional stories out in the open. When I went to college in California and made a home there after college, I made many driving trips back to Colorado. It was a 26-hours drive, most of it across southern Mojave, Nevada, and Utah, often at night, when moonlight would light the ranges and the lights of distant towns would be visible 50 miles away. I love that! This drive grounds me; I can’t explain it. I feel so comfortable, so eager, so alive when I’m driving on a road whose shoulders give way to miles of sagebrush and a spectacular, changing sky. Also, I came up in a time when Las Vegas was home to the Rat Pack — when Humbert Humbert and Lolita drove through Monument Valley; when Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable were making The Misfits in the desert just before she died; when nuclear test sites were in the news; the same time when Robert Irwin and Edward Ruscha were going to the desert to fill their creative wells and writing about it in ArtForum; Carlos Castaneda wrote his books about enlightenment in the Sonora Desert, Jack Kerouac was writing about his travels, and Route 66 was big on TV. The desert always seemed to figure in. Mark Twain’s Roughing It; stories of boom and bust, Bodied and other Western ghost towns, the Oregon Trail, the Donner Party…  In fact, my great-grandmother lost her husband on Oregon Trail (and they were some of the late ones!) but continued to raise her sons in the Willamette Valley. A family fascination with John Wesley Powell; family history in and near the Grand Canyon; the ill-fated attempt of my great-great-grandmother to settle in Anaheim; the meanderings of Kit Carson, Jedediah Smith, and other mountain men… I can’t get enough of stories and lore about the Western desert! Africa also figured in my childhood, and now my interest in deserts is broadening to the mother of all deserts — the Sahara.

JS: What inspires you more about the desert than the magnificent redwoods so near your home?

ES: Based on what I describe above, I think it’s in my DNA. I love the redwoods, but it’s not visceral, genetic; the comfort level, curiosity, and “can’t get enough” feelings just aren’t there. I would rather see a blue ridge hovering on the horizon ten miles away with nothing but that rhythmic pattern of sagebrush between it and me than put my arms 10º around a redwood tree — don’t ask me why. Also, that sense of longing is really important. I think the desert became much more important to me when I moved away. Also, I love the heat, the brightness, the yellowness, the warmth, the silence, the dry air… These are sensations which please me.

JS: I have always found your work so lovely — really beautiful, in addition to being artistically brilliant. Do you set out to make aesthetically rich work — eye candy — or what?

ES: I know I place a high value on beauty. I know I want to make work that seduces and fascinates and holds people’s interest. I like work that is lyrical like Agnes Martin’s, and that is sublime like James Lavadour’s. I wouldn’t say I consciously start out to make an “eye candy” image. That is not my goal.  I do select and preserve areas of a painting that seem beautiful to me. I think one of the reasons I’ve stuck with watercolor all these years — and when I paint with oil or acrylic paint, I use it like watercolor — is that I feel qualities within the paint are beautiful, what the paint does on its own is beautiful, and a lot of what I do now I’m just enabling the paint to speak, just setting the stage. To me, its action is positively geologic. It’s like playing in a sandbox, creating memory-based or longing-based topographies, making imaginary deserts in my studio here in redwood country. To me, my paintings are miniature geologies.

JS: How does your work develop from stark landscape to such lushness without losing the quality of sand and rock and starkness associated with the desert?

ES: Most of my work is memory-based. I collect a lot of information when I’m in the desert: photos, plant material, trash, sketches, sediment, smells, photos of rattlesnakes, etc. I have a tactile relationship with these things — plant textures, rust, weather-ridged cardboard, images of frost on sagebrush, etc. While they are out of place in my Ferndale studio, these things serve to bring the desert here for me and give me a starting place or add into the mix of my process. The work evolves in layers. I’m interested in colors, in erosion, and the natural, organic stuff the paint does. There’s a lot of scrubbing and repainting, mind-changes and re-orientation in my process. I tend to preserve areas that delight me and scrub and/or repaint areas that aren’t as satisfactory. The same processes that happen in nature happen in my paintings: flows, backwashes, granulation, sedimentation. These effects please me just like the desert pleases me.

JS: Did you paint as a child?

ES: I drew and painted all the time. My parents encouraged me to think of myself as an artist. They signed me up for private drawing and painting lessons whenever an artist role-model entered their circle of friends. In fact, when I got to college and wanted to major in Psychology, they said I belonged in Art.

JS: How does motherhood affect your work now that your kids are older, and how did it affect it when your kids were little?

ES: My boys are so smart and astute, they are my inspiration. Of course, when they were younger and at home, they unknowingly interfered with my career! All children do that! Having children has been even better for me than making art, though, surprisingly. Now that they are on their own, I rely on their advice, response, and inspiration more than ever. They are my techno gurus — they help me with my web presence, mirror my work to me, and give me a reason to get up and go to the studio every day. I don’t know what I would do without them. They are indispensable.

JS: How do you avoid sentimentality in your work, when you are such a devoted wife and mother and your work is so aesthetically pleasing?

ES: Sentimental things are just perfect on their own — no need to make pictures of them, and the pictures never do them justice. I resist the idea that I’m making pictures “of” things. My paintings are a byproduct of a process that involves walking, collecting, photographing, reflecting, getting closer to myself, and, after all that is done, enjoying what pigment and water do when they are let loose. The simple action of paint is much more of a miracle than any sentimental likeness — any “painter of light” kind of thing.

JS: That may be the thing that strikes me most about your paintings. In the hands of so many artists, the images might develop the way of greeting-card fodder, but you always manage to shape them with such artistic mastery that one never sees them as purely “pretty” pieces.

ES: Thanks. I might not think they are especially “pretty,” but I do want to roll around in them.

JS: Do you enjoy teaching? Is it an extension of you as an artist, or is it part and parcel, or is it a chore that pays the bills?

ES: I love teaching and I take it very seriously. Teaching is not a one-way street. I learn more from my students on a daily basis than I do from any other source. I find it a great and stimulating challenge to devise ways to communicate concepts and ideas that are present in art. What balance to strike and what works is different with every class and with every individual. I love practicing flexibility; I love devising teaching aids; I love talking about art. Teaching is fulfilling on so many levels. When I think of the great teachers I have had and the wisdom they imparted that is now part of my life on a daily basis, I want to play that role for other fledgling artists. Collaterally, it’s also the best way I’ve found to pay the bills.

JS: Is it a combination of some or all of those, or something else entirely?

ES: Teaching is a way to pull your thoughts together about your life’s purpose.

JS: What are you working on now? What’s next for you?

ES: I’m attracted to the situation in Las Vegas — sprawl meets desert, the edge of Las Vegas, the problem of water, the “lie” of Las Vegas (that there’s plenty of water, that it’s a glamorous and happy place, etc.)… At this very moment, I’m writing a proposal for a conceptual piece which explores the idea of “getting rid” of streets in Las Vegas whose names reflect false sentimental ideas about place, like “Crimson Tide Court,” or “Creekside.” Have you ever looked at the street names in the suburbs of Las Vegas? They’re ridiculous. Also, I’m developing some walking projects in the Las Vegas area. A lot of my energy is going toward devising ways to spend time in the desert, now that I’m teaching so much closer to home. I’m exploring that feeling of longing, as I believe it is a consistent theme in my work of the last ten years. Maps are becoming much more important in my paintings and my work.  I’m interested in landmarks in the process of painting and in the painting itself — areas that are delightful and preservable just for how the paint works. The paintings become maps of themselves. We’ll see where this idea goes. I’m also using topographic maps of specific places as matrices for the application of paint. Two separate actions (walking in place and painting) coincide.  I’ve also been working on a mounting system in which small pieces are arranged in a grid of squares, also maplike. I’m interested in the space between the squares as a grid. When I go to the studio, I never really know what will happen. When I’m not trying to get to the desert, I’m trying to get to the studio. I hope to go to Burning Man for the first time this year.

Top Image: “The Beat of Walking” watercolor & sediment on paper. 15″ x 100″  2006